Collecting societies do the work music copyright holders can't do on their own, like tracking and distributing radio royalties. But in Germany there's only one collecting society, called GEMA, and they're known to impose exclusivity over artists who want to share their music publicly. This is why many creators from Germany and other parts of Europe don't have the option to use Creative Commons while also participating in a collecting society.

From this need emerges the Cultural Commons Collecting Society (aka. C3S), an artist-friendly, transparent, flexible collecting society. Wolfgang Senges, one of the project's co-initiators, recently presented about C3S at the Creative Commons Global Summit (slides here), and the project will be legally founded September 25th, during the Reeperbahn Festival in Hamburg.

So far on their crowndfunding page, C3S has raised over 80,000 € in addition to the 30,000 € already raised for their legal founding. Senges points out that the crowdfunding effort still needs to reach the 200,000 € goal in order to have the resources necessary to meet the requirements for starting a collecting society. Here's where you can pledge your support, and even purchase a "share" to have your music administered by C3S after their launch.

In celebration of C3S, the Free Music Archive is proud to host the C3S Ignition Mix featuring GEMA-free music under Creative Commons licenses.

Here is their video explaining the need and goals of this C3S Project:

Last year the FMA's Jason Sigal spoke at a SXSW panel with C3S's Wolfgang Senges and the Free Music Archive's Chris Zabriskie. Here's their talk if you're interested in learning more about this subject.

What questions do you have about how C3S works? Post them down below and we'll share them with our friends at the C3S project.